Remember the first Venom movie? No, not Spider-Man 3, but the 2018 project with Tom Hardy that somehow still seems like it came out forever ago. If you recall, that inaugural film underwent a lot of studio meddling, cost a bunch of money, and was thought to be so bad by both its studio and stars that basically nobody wanted to promote it (Hardy was AWOL while co-star Michelle Williams openly admitted that it was a paycheck gig for her). The thing is, for all the lack of faith, it still somehow made an inordinate amount of money and has now spawned not one but two sequels, the latest of which is Venom: The Last Dance, a supremely silly thing that can in no way be regarded as anything but objectively bad but which nevertheless is just idiosyncratic and amusing enough to offer viewers a genuinely decent time.
Thankfully, you really don’t need to remember anything about the other two Venoms except the basics: Eddie (Hardy) has been infected with a vicious and human brain-eating alien symbiote that grants him superpowers, has basically ruined his life, and has also become his best friend. Due to events from the last movie that really don’t matter enough to revisit, Eddie is hiding out in Mexico as a fugitive. Meanwhile, over at a soon-to-be-decommissioned Area 51, General Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and scientist Dr. Payne (Juno Temple) are studying other recovered symbiotes. The trouble starts when an ancient being called Knull, who apparently created the symbiotes in the first place, threatens to release himself from some intergalactic prison by using a key that only Venom has — strange that this never came up before — so that he can destroy the universe. That’s the general idea anyway.
The Last Dance lurches from location to location and plot beat to plot beat with almost no rhythm or sense of narrative economy. The editing is so coarse that you can honestly tell when two disparate scenes have been grafted together to make some last-minute story change make a little bit of sense, and the characters’ motivations are not so much mysterious as non-existent. And yet somehow, none of those obvious failures really matter. This is because despite how clunky and junky everything else is, watching Hardy basically play off himself (he does the voice of his titular monster buddy too) as a man who is in a constant state of anxiety and terror while a voice in his head tells him to eat people is endlessly hilarious — these two openly refer to themselves as Thelma and Louise, after all. Amazingly, the climax of the film even actually manages some genuine pathos, and it’s entirely due to Hardy’s gonzo performance. But don’t worry, you also get ridiculous stuff throughout as well, like Venom taking over a horse and turning it into a big alien steed.
The downside is that Venom is the Poochie of these movies. Whenever Venom isn’t on screen viewers are basically left only to wonder when he’s going to show up and deliver something gross or strange. When he does show up, we are often treated to truly dumb sequences, like one where Eddie and Venom meet their old friend Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) — who ran the convenience store by their old apartment and knows about the monster (and likes him!) — in Vegas, at which point the movie basically stops in order to stage a dance routine with a giant superbeast and a nice Chinese lady. In other words, you sort of already know if you’re going to be up for something like The Last Dance. And all of this is helped immensely by the sense that this character has somehow become a passion project for Hardy, who seems as baffled as anyone that people seem to actively enjoy it, and that mixed joy and bewilderment go a long way to making the experience relatively tasty. These films might be terrible by any and all objective metrics, but there simply isn’t really anything else out there quite like them.
DIRECTOR: Kelly Marcel; CAST: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing; IN THEATERS: October 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 49 min.
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